This highly ambitious first novel exists within a fine web of literary influences and allusions. The publisher invites comparisons to The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s novel set in a university Classics department. The novel’s narrator, Julia, a student enthralled by the glamorous, moneyed family of a classmate, echoes that of Brideshead Revisited. Self-conscious references to detective noir and nineteenth-century romance novels abound. All of these comparisons have some merit, but another takes precedence, not only flavouring the text, but providing a skeleton for the characters and plot.

First and foremost, The Legacy is a contemporary update of Henry James’s masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady, with the action shifting from a Europe beset by travelling Americans, to Sydney and New York. In a thoroughly contemporary twist, its unhappily married heroine disappears from the World Trade Centre site on 9/11.

Bright, beautiful Ingrid, informally adopted by her wealthy aunt after her mother’s death, is transplanted from distant Perth to Sydney. There, she is worshipped by her new family, particularly her doting uncle George and besotted invalid cousin, Ralph – who secretly convinces his ailing father to leave her a fortune. ‘With this inheritance, [George] really had bought a role for himself as the executive producer of whatever she chose to do next.’ And Ralph is ‘instrumental in achieving it’. What she chooses, to the disquiet of all onlookers, is to marry Gilbert Grey, a man of exquisite taste but no warmth or compassion, whose lack of affection for her she misconstrues as admirable restraint. The match is carefully engineered by a family friend, Maeve, who is strangely close to both Gil and his daughter, Fleur, a child prodigy painter. (‘It was just as though Maeve had handed Grey a gift.’)